01 April 2014

Sylvia Plath: American Muse

The Estate of Sylvia Plath, HarperCollins, and Hormel Foods, the makers of SPAM, have joined together for National Poetry Month and released a special, limited edition SPAM with lines from Plath's poetry branded on the product. A special chemical added to the product will commit that poem to the memory of the consumer in five languages: English, French, German, American, and XML.

The precooked meat has also been re-packaged with SPAM serving as an acronym for Sylvia Plath American Muse. These can be found in grocery and convenience stores across the United States.

While this may seem random, but Plath was familiar with SPAM. Plath wrote a letter to her mother on 15 August 1952 about a lunch that her then kind-of-still boyfriend Richard Norton made for her down in Cape Cod. She writes that he was adorable and was very insistent that he made a lunch salad which consisted of cantaloupe, melon, cheese and spam. She described it as artistic. The letter is unpublished.

The other reason, is to commemorate a significant anniversary: It is exactly the 32 years, 4 months, and 5 days anniversary of the publication of Plath's Collected Poems, which was first published in the US in November 1981 by Harper & Row.

Beginning today, also, bookstores around the country will be selling, special limited edition Collected Poems printed on compressed, treated, and thinly sliced SPAM. The type is a mixture of pepper and black sesame seeds. Comparable to "onion-skin", SPAM-skin is cheap and lightweight; it is also biodegradable and eco-friendly paper. The book weighs approximately .5 ounces, will ship anywhere in the world reasonably, and can be eaten should you be too hungry.